Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part One Agency
- Part Two Sexuality
- Introduction to Part Two
- Chapter Four Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women
- Chapter Five Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female Child
- Chapter Six Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
- Part Three Indeterminacy
- Notes
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ
Chapter Six - Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
from Part Two - Sexuality
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Part One Agency
- Part Two Sexuality
- Introduction to Part Two
- Chapter Four Author-izing the Female: Women Loving Women Loving Women
- Chapter Five Patterns of Innocence: The Rescue of the Female Child
- Chapter Six Lesbian Existence: Impossible Dreams of Exteriority
- Part Three Indeterminacy
- Notes
- Primary Bibliography
- Secondary Bibliography
- Index of Names
- Index of Novels and Short Stories by Joanna Russ
Summary
Let's be reasonable. Let's demand the impossible—Russ, (On
Strike Against God, 107)
There is no one person in or out of fiction who represents a stronger challenge to the Judeo-Christian tradition, to patriarchy and phallocentrism, than the lesbian-feminist—Elaine Marks (282)
Radical feminist thinkers affiliated with Kristeva's second moment in feminism, such as Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly or Andrea Dworkin, base their cultural criticism on the idea that heterosexual intercourse serves as one of the central sites of women's oppression in patriarchy. Therefore, from this perspective, it is only from within patriarchal conceptualizations of sexuality that feminist interventions can displace this oppression. As Chapter Five demonstrated, attaining agency does not complete the processes of feminist utopian speculation in Russ's fiction. Russ simultaneously explores how women's economic position in patriarchy is linked to their bodies and their sexuality through a complex system of mutual interaction.
Russ's central ‘heterosexual’ protagonists, Alyx in the short story collection The Adventures of Alyx, Jael in The Female Manand Irene in The Two of Them, assert their agency by killing a man, but this act by itself does not make these women subjects of their sexual desire. Alyx, the woman who kills a man she hates without so much as winking, she who never hesitates to act, becomes an instrument of her lover's pleasure in copulation:
‘Forgiven,’ Alyx managed to say as he plunged in, as she diffused over the landscape—sixty leagues in each direction— and then turned into a drum, a Greek one, hourglass-shaped with the thumped in-and-out of both skins so extreme that they finally met in the middle, so that she then turned insideout, upside-down and switched right-and-left sides, every cell, both hands, each lobe of her brain, all at once, while someone (anonymous) picked her up by the navel and shook her violently in all directions, remarking ‘If you don't make them cry, they won't live.’ She came to herself with the idea that Machine was digging up rocks. He was banging her on the head with his chin. (Picnic on Paradise, 121–22)
The narrative of Alyx's own sexual pleasure buries this pleasure in images of passivity which remove her from her self.
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- Information
- Demand My WritingJoanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction, pp. 155 - 166Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1999